Advent Lutheran Church

"How to Un-worry (8th Sunday after Epiphany)"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            I’d like to share with you a sampling of recent headlines.  “Stocks drop as oil jumps to two-year high”; “Heavy gunfire in Tripoli; U.S. evacuates Americans”; “Death toll rises in New Zealand”; “Inflation: The economic monster that roared in the ‘70s is creeping back”; “Thousands march on capitols as union turmoil spreads”; and, last but not least, “Obnoxious people: They’re out there.  Unstoppable.  Unavoidable.  And they’re ruining your day”.

            I don’t intend to be one of those obnoxious people who are ruining your day, but those headlines and thousands like them are simply part of our everyday, contemporary life, as we know so well.  The reality that those headlines convey brings with it a very profound message, and the message is this: Worry.  Be very, very worried.  And it’s into the midst of that reality that Jesus comes this morning, bearing a counter-message that is even more profound, and that counter-message is this: Do not worry.

            We are probably the least receptive generation in history to that message, Don’t worry.  We are the market for a 100-mile-an-hour news cycle that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no breaks, no let-ups; we have cell phones and social media that make us the best-connected people of all time (I understand that the world first learned of the New Zealand earthquake last Tuesday from a micro-blogger who was blogging about the event as it was taking place – beneath his feet).  We have more information at our fingertips than anyone ever has, and that’s a great advantage in making sound decisions; but that information overload also brings with it multiple opportunities for worry.

That fact dramatically separates us from our ancestors in the faith.  Those who first heard Jesus speak had relatively few opportunities for worry, but the opportunities they had very extremely immediate.  Peasants in the First Century did not have to worry about holding on to their day jobs – most of them did not have one.  They did not spend an hour in their walk-in closet pondering which outfit they would wear that morning – they were lucky if they had one set of hand-me-downs. 

Jesus was speaking to a people for whom food was a daily question, and the question was not what they would eat or when, but if.  Daily existence was a matter of daily desperation; these people were itinerant – they had no stable homes, most of them – and they were dependent on those around them for their daily necessities.  Some scholars suggest that Jesus’ audience, and indeed Jesus himself, would have comprised the lowest rung on the social ladder, a group that social scientists have called the Expendables, because no one would have noticed or cared if they simply ceased to exist.  And it is to these people that Jesus says, Don’t worry.

His comment comes within a larger context, the Sermon on the Mount.  We’ve been spending time over the last three sermons with the Sermon on the Mount, from Matthew’s Gospel.  It’s here that Jesus illustrates for his listeners a reality that is profoundly different from the one they were experiencing.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he told them.  “Blessed are those who mourn.  Blessed are the meek.  Blessed are those who make peace instead of war.  Blessed are those who show mercy.  You are blessed,” Jesus said, “because God is on your side.  And because he is, he wants you to live differently.

“If someone strikes you, do not strike back.  If someone wants to borrow from you, give it.  You’re already used to loving your friends; God also wants you to love your enemies.  He wants your actions to change, and he wants your changed actions to come from a changed heart.  I know it’s different from what you’re used to,” he went on, “but it’s God’s way: God wants you to live a generous life, not a selfish life; he wants you to live a gracious life, not a closed-in life.  And he wants you to live that way for one reason: because that’s exactly the way he lives toward you.

“Keep that in mind when you choose which master you will serve.  And don’t kid yourselves,” Jesus told them, “everybody serves a master; the only question is which it will be.  Will it be the real God, or something less?  It’s important to choose carefully, because the master you choose will bring with it certain qualities that will rub off on you.  If you choose to serve the real God, that master brings with it confidence and courage and peace and hope.  If you choose to serve another master, no matter which one, that master will bring with it one essential quality: worry.”

We should make a distinction here.  “Worry” is not the same thing as responsible concern.  I had dinner Wednesday night in the fellowship hall with a friend; she’s a high school student, and she said that she had to spend the rest of the evening studying for a chemistry test the next day, and she was concerned about it.  That’s not same as worry; worry is obsessing over something to the extent that it exercises control over us.

It’s not going out on a limb to observe that one master that we often obey and shape our lives around is the master of money.  We think about it, fret over it, talk about it, get educated so we can make more of it.  Maybe the reason our money says, “In God We Trust” is to remind us that we so often are tempted to serve it instead of the real God.  And so often we do.

Every year the American Psychological Association takes a survey that reveals Americans’ top anxieties.  Here are the first four worries that occupied Americans last year: having enough income; issues at work; the American economy; and job stability.  They all boil down to the same concern, don’t they?  Money.  Twenty-five percent of the survey respondents said that they experienced, not just stress but “extremely high” levels of stress.  One in four.  The survey went on to outline the various health risks associated with high levels of stress, including heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic pain syndromes.    

What was interesting was the fact that most of the parents in the survey said that they were doing a good job of keeping their stress under wraps and away from their children.  Seventy percent of parents said they were keeping their stress to themselves.  But 91 percent of the children said they knew their parents were under stress about money, and those were the kids who reported feeling sadness, frustration, and anxiety over their parents’ anxiety over money.

Yes, the master of money brings with it a tremendous burden of worry.

Not only are we anxious about money; we parents in this community and in this congregation are anxious about our children.  My goodness, are we anxious about our children.  This isn’t easy to hear, and it isn’t easy to say, but it’s the truth: often, despite our best intentions, we elevate our children to a status that they were never intended to occupy, a status that God has reserved only for God’s self: the status of a master who decides how we will live, and why we do what we do.

We see it all the time: parents increasingly disconnected from each other because they’re so busy tending to the desires – not the needs, but the desires – of their children.  They’ve lost the capacity to distinguish between wants and needs, so everything becomes a need, and they’re running themselves ragged trying to make sure that their children’s “needs” are met.  Family meal times are sacrificed on the altar of youth sports.  And worst of all, family time with God, when parents actually keep the promises they made at their children’s baptisms – to teach them the basics of the faith, to teach them to pray, to teach them how to put God first in all things – those family times with God are simply abandoned because everyone is so worn out from everything else.

And again, we do it with the best of intentions: we want our kids to be happy, to fit in, to have friends, to do well in school so they can get good grades so they can get into a good college so they can get a good job so they can … be successful.  But at some point we have to ask ourselves: In what system do we want our children to flourish?    

Jesus says the same thing to us as to his original disciples.  There are essentially two options, two orientations to life: If we see life as a competitive struggle between winners and losers over a limited supply of resources, then we will become slaves to that struggle.  But if we see life as a gift from God, filled to overflowing with God’s generous abundance, we are free to hold our possessions and our families, and even our fears, lightly – and we can live generously toward others.  Put another way, if we allow God to be our master, we have no reason to obsess over anything else, no reason to, as Jesus put it, “worry.”  And worry has the ability to act on us like a dense, debilitating fog. 

The name Florence Chadwick is probably not a household name, unless you happen to be a marathon swimmer, which she was.  Back in the 1950s she became the first woman to swim the English Channel in both directions: in 1950 she swam from France to England, and the following year she swam from England to France, a considerably more difficult accomplishment because of the adverse wind and current.

The following year, 1952, she decided to set herself another goal.  She wanted to swim from Catalina Island to the coast of California, a distance of 26 miles.  On the day of the swim, she entered the water at Catalina Island amid favorable weather conditions.  But at some point, a dense fog settled over the ocean, thick and impenetrable.  They call it the marine layer, an incredibly disorienting fog.  When Chadwick was 16 hours into her swim and in the midst of this horrendous fog, she decided that she was done and wanted out of the water.  There were several small boats surrounding her, watching out for sharks and making sure that she was all right.  Her mother was in one of the boats.  Chadwick called out, “Get me out, I can’t make it.”  Her mother called back, “Florence, you can, just keep going.”  “No,” Florence cried out, “pull me out.”  So they pulled her into one of the boats, only to discover a short time later that she had quit her swim just a half-mile from shore.  Because of the fog, she couldn’t see her goal.

Two months later, she tried again.  She slipped into the water at Catalina Island, and the weather conditions were the same: the water was cold, the wind was whipping the waves, and once again the marine layer of fog settled in and over the area like a dense, thick blanket.  But this time Florence Chadwick made it all the way to the California coast, and she made it, she said later, because as she swam she kept in her mind’s eye the vision of that coast, the coast that she couldn’t see but which she knew was out there, getting closer.  At some point, the vision became reality.

Just so, the vision became reality for Jesus’ disciples.  Jesus drew people to himself by living the words that he spoke: Turn the other cheek.  Share what you have.  Heal what you can.  Love your enemies.  Above all, put God first.  In his presence, those words became flesh.

And what the disciples discovered was that as they continued their journey with Jesus, they too could embody his words.  In his presence, his words came to life in them.  Not all the time, and not perfectly, but enough so that they realized that they had discovered a way of life and not just an impractical fantasy.

So it comes down to us, people of Advent.  God sends us out, back into our neighborhoods, our families, our friendships, our workplaces; to live our lives among the people who know us, and who are watching us to see just how this life really works.  Be reconciled.  Forgive.  Turn trying times into trusting times, trusting in God’s presence, God’s power, God’s providing.  And let your light so shine before others that they may see your good words and give glory to your father in heaven, even as your father in heaven has already glorified you in the life of his son, Jesus Christ.  Amen.